Saintly Thoughts

I despair at truth. Not at the existence of truth as such, but at our capacity to discover truth. Truth itself is inaccessible to mankind. Thus, those murmurs underlying the foundation of our being, those half-forgotten monsters of the deep, those demons of the subconscious--we may not banish them to the abyss. They will continue to haunt us. I know there are many of you who would wish that we could give up on the traditional forms and move boldly forward in the light of our own resourcefulness. No, change does not occur that way and that quickly. It must evolve as we continue to learn about the nature of Being Itself, about the Nature of God. Don't be fooled, our understanding of the divine will continues to evolve--it must evolve--so long as mankind walks the earth. There may come a day, when we may worship God in Spirit and in Truth that these annoying specific traditions of religion will pass away and transform into that True Beingness of which they are an image. Today is not that day, however, and we cannot will it (I do not mean to deny the efficacy or the possibility of revelation, such as it is. But we owe it to ourselves to lend our inquiry the respectability of historical experience, and not simply to parrot the words of the faithful--of whatever faith--that behold the final revelation has come). We must continue to live in a half life, where we are enthralled by the future and terrified of the past (and vice versa) in equal measure and successively. The God of Myth is not dead and the God of Science is not in ascent, for in the end they are one and the same. But do not be pigheaded! Do not insist that the old ways are always necessary and best. They are not. Do not be convinced that you have understood the message written in scripture and in the material world. You have not! Approach the thing with wonder, with love, with tolerance, with amusement, with respect, with terror. We do not know the measure of man and while we may know that we sin, we have yet to fully categorize our sins. So judge not, that you not be judged, lest you would be judged without a law book (according to Camus, the harshest of human torments). Remember, everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. Beneficence is not an absolute category of being; milk may be beneficial to the babe in arms and not to the adult. Just so, what was once not beneficial to man at one point in time need not be un-beneficial to him in our day. We must be careful in this, lest we call what is merely our own sinful preference good. But we must beware the opposite extreme as well, and in a misplaced sense of righteousness declare that which is not bad evil. Surely we must resist the devil, but we need not needlessly magnify his influence.

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